Tuesday, March 6, 2012

On our recent trip to Colombia, I spotted some lovely looking treats at Masa, a trendy new café in Bogotá. Determined to practice my rusty high school Spanish, I racked my brain for the Spanish equivalent for cupcakes. I finally settled on variants of eso and uno. "Uno de chocolate. Uno de arequipe." When I got my recipe I needn't have worried, cupcakes truly have gone global...

The half dozen that I scored included a chocolate cupcake topped with arequipe (a Colombian type of dulce de leche) and chocolate crunchies, a lemon cupcake with a toasted meringue icing, vanilla cupcakes with chocolate and vanilla frosting, and chocolate cupcakes with vanilla and chocolate frosting.

Overall the cupcakes got high marks from the family for flavor, though the arequipe and lemon were my personal favorites.

The lemon cupcake was unexpectedly tart. Perfectly puckery. While the chocolate cake was super fudgy and moist, add caramelly goodness and chocolate crunchies and the the other cupcakes really didn't have a chance.